2.1. Pesticides
The use of synthetic pesticides for plant protection has environmental consequences which are a subject of growing public concern. Detection of pesticides remaining in the environment is therefore a matter of increasing importance. Current methods for detecting pesticide residues are extremely time-consuming and costly, since they require highly specialized and expensive apparatus. There is an urgent need in the art to improve existing detection methods making them cheaper, more efficient and more easily manageable. The desired methods should also be useful outside the laboratory under field conditions, such that they can quickly and reliably provide a grower with information on the presence and concentrations of a given pesticide or metabolite in a soil, water or plant sample. In this regard, it is important that the methods differentiate the active pesticide material from its inactive breakdown products allowing quantitative determination of the percentage of active material actually present in the soil.
The registration and use of pesticides throughout the world requires accurate and precise analysis. Parent molecules, key metabolites and chemical breakdown products must be identified and studied in well-designed laboratory and field trials. In response to the need for detecting lower and lower levels of contaminants in crops, water, soil and farm animals, increasingly sophisticated and sensitive methods of analysis are needed. However, a number of serious limitations of classical methods still remain. Some of these limitations would be overcome by the use of immunoassay technology.